Gaie Sebold, Shanghai Sparrow (2014)

Enjoyable if slightly underwhelming steampunk adventure: I read it easily and with pleasure, but it left me feeling a bit meh. Stea-meh-punk. Our main P.O.V. character is alt-Victorian orphan thief-and-chancer Eveline Duchen, a sort of female Artful Dodger ('Martha Dodger'?), who lives with a gang of like-wise lightfingered girls presided over by Ma Pether, a sort of female Fagin ('Faye Gin'? Look, I'm coming up empty here ...). She is caught in the process of robbing a sleazy old cleric by a certain Mr Holmforth. Rather than face deportation, Evie agrees to be trained up by Holmforth and the severe Miss Cairngrim so as to be useful to the Empire in unspecified 19th-C spy-y wy-y shenanigans. Evie's backstory bogs down the middle chunk of the book rather; but we learn eventually that Holmforth thinks that Eveline may have inherited a familial ability to harness quasi-magical 'etheric power' (or something), which in turn could be put at the service of expanding the British Empire globe-wide. However much this latter eventually is (we can all agree) a consummation devoutly to be wished, Eveline doesn't actually have the etheric powers for which H. is hoping. She is, though, a pleasantly feisty, resourceful heroine, and the story moves along.

It's almost all London. There are a few interspersed sliver chapters set in the titular Shanghai, and a late flourish of story set in China (reached via super-speed airship, of course). There's a teacher figure called Liu, who was a touch too orientalised-inscrutable for my taste (generally speaking Sebold goes out of her way to be sensitive to issues of gender, race and class; I don't mean to misrepresent what is a work genuinely thoughtful about empire and its problematic). Also I'd say that 312 pages is somewhere between 111 and 112 pages too long for the story Sebold wants to tell: a short, sharp, steamnoir adventure yarn. Not bad. That's a dispiriting two-word judgment for any writer to encounter, I know; but it's better than the latter term on its own.

What's that? What d'ye say? Bof. "Spy-y wy-y" is too a real English idiom. How very dare you.